To start with, Ill begin at the end. The opening night audience for Cirque du Soleil gave itself permission to leap to its feet in a long and loud standing ovation. Apparently, not every town responds this way. I feel sad for those people who cannot feel moved, who cannot recognize the peak of human physical artistry when it happens right in front of your eyes. Thankfully, I live in a place that made itself clear, and gave its gratitude back to the performers who just pushed the laws of physics and kinetics to their limit.
There is no other word but thankfulness that sums up the audience experience. It is nice to see a hot new country star come to play here, it is nostalgic to watch a classic rock concert by a gold record legend, or have a stand-up comedian get the crowd laughing, but what Cirque does is profound. These performers are the ultimate human examples of what the human body is capable of, and when their artistic peers join them to wrap the best archetypal elements of story and theatre, lighting and music, staging and costume into the experience, it stands humbly above all the others.
You know true power of performance is before you when the actors require no extra gestures to incite applause. Nobody needed to pump up the crowd for the big moments, or over-pose to emphasize the moment to clap. When someone leaps feet-first at a sprint run through a hole the size of a garbage can and lands running on their hands, or when someone hangs upside down 20 feet above the ground, holding on by the strength of one Achilles tendon, spinning and dancing all the while (even her hair had muscles!), there is no need to throw in a lets hear it, everyone!
They do smile, they do show enthusiasm, they do swagger and dance but what none of the performers ever does is strut.
The Cirque performers are so comfortable in their abilities that they take the audience reactions however they may come. Perhaps you gasp, perhaps you shout out loud, perhaps you stare in gaping silence. It all gets conveyed back to the stage.
A book could be written to describe each and every acts abilities. But you would need that book to touch on them all. Yes, it is essential to mention that people walk up walls from the force of trampoline bounces, and one man - perhaps the most perfectly chiseled man on the planet - harnessed the spinning power of the earths axis inside two crossed wheels that he somehow kept from rocketing into the 12th row. One womans body went in four directions at once, then reverse those directions all while holding her entire body weight on a single hand balanced on a pole that was rotating. A man and woman whipped through the air on vines of blue silk, linking and crawling over each other in a dance of sensuous devotion to each other and to the idea of our universal dream of flying.
Cirque du Soleil could have lined the acts up, rolled them out one after another, and still earned every penny of our ticket price, but they do much more. For those who look for it, you will find a story. All those characters clad in ochre tones (brown, yellow, purple), they represent the creatures and plants and dirt itself affixed to earth. Those wearing greens are the water, those in reds are the fire and those in blue represent air and sky.
And then they mix. When the characters on the trampoline are frothing in a frenzy, up and down, round and round, it is no coincidence they are clad in the colours of water and fire. They are boiling.
When the diabolos performers are throwing, catching and power-tossing their Chinese yoyos across the stage in impossible patterns, it is no coincidence they are clad in both blue and green. They are the combination of elements at the nucleus and the yoyo is their radical electron. They are the embodiment of a chemical reaction.
When a creepy dancer emerges from the body of a spider, then cradles first one then two then up to seven white orbs in the air in a juggling frenzy, it is no coincidence he is dressed in brown and gets fed the balls from an air character above. The balls represent the egg - birth, procreation, sustenance - and the juggler is firmly earthbound. The creatures of the sea lay eggs, as do the creatures of the air, but all require the ground to nest them and bring them to life. Whatever goes up must obey the laws of nature and come back to earth.
So, even the subliminal narrative is constantly working to earn the audiences appreciation.
Remember, also that all the singing and music is live. No two performances are ever going to be exactly the same.
Perhaps those standing ovations and large crowds at CN Centre (ticket sales have been strong) will be enough to convince Cirque du Soleil to bring another show to Prince George one day. We now have the assurance that the Cirque name means the absolute best in performance value. But it wont be this show. Dralion, the 15-year-old program seen here this week, has only two more stops in its life before Cirque retires it forever. I wouldnt blame anyone who wanted to fly to Fairbanks or Anchorage to see it again before that happens.
